Three months ago, Facebook was a social-media company with a rapidly growing advertising business. On Wednesday, when it reports first-quarter financial results, Facebook will look more like a tech portfolio company making outsized gambles.

“This is all about the infusion of technology into consumers’ everyday lives and wanting to be in the center of all those interactions,” says Rajeev Chand, managing director and head of research at boutique investment bank Rutberg & Co.

Grand ambitions aside, Facebook’s results will reflect the health of its advertising business. Analysts expect per-share earnings excluding certain items of 24 cents, double the 12 cents in the same quarter a year earlier, according S&P Capital IQ. Revenue is projected to increase 60%, to $2.4 billion.

Facebook will release its results after New York trading hours and host a conference call for investors beginning at 5 p.m. ET. The Journal will live blog the call on Digits. Here are a few things to watch.

Engagement: Facebook’s roster of users who log on at least once a month continues to grow steadily, to 1.23 billion as of Dec. 31. More impressive is the percentage of users who log into the service every day. In the fourth quarter of 2011, 57% of Facebook users logged in daily. At the end of 2013, it was 62%.

Frequent users are more valuable to Facebook because they look at more ads and enter more personal information that can be mined for ad targeting. Investors will be watching that number closely.

International growth: Facebook has reached most of its target population in North America and Europe, and the company is making a big push to find users in the rest of the world. It’s working with cellular providers, for instance, to offer free Facebook access on low-end phones in countries like India, where few people can afford an Apple iPhone.

Facebook discloses user numbers by four regions: U.S. & Canada, Europe, Asia and the “Rest of the World.” Of the 172 million users Facebook added last year, 142 million came from Asia and Rest of the World. Given Facebook’s efforts overseas, those international growth numbers should get a big boost.

International revenue per user: Facebook generates less revenue per user in the regions where it’s growing fastest. In the U.S. & Canada, for instance, the average Facebook user generated $6.03 in the fourth quarter of 2013. In Asia, that was 95 cents; in the “Rest of the World,” it was only 84 cents.

As it adds users in these regions, Facebook also must turn those users into profits. Look for Facebook’s average revenue per user to grow in Asia and the Rest of the World.

Ad revenue: Facebook is selling a lot of ads, according to Adobe’s Social Intelligence Report. Adobe says it’s seen a 41% quarter-over-quarter increase in the number of impressions.

On top of that, Facebook is charging more for ads sold based on the number of users who view them. Nanigans, which places ads on Facebook for companies, says the cost of Facebook ads more than tripled in the first quarter, compared with a year earlier. That’s a departure from the rest of digital advertising, where ad prices are generally dropping.

Together, those trends could foreshadow a potentially huge quarter of ad revenue for Facebook.

WhatsApp, Oculus and the next new thing: On the conference call, Facebook executives will surely be questioned about their plans for WhatsApp and Oculus. Anything that Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg says about those acquisitions will be interesting for investors, who seem to have many different theories on the purchases.

A bigger question for Facebook is whether it can innovate in-house. Facebook has embarked on a mission to create a new line of mobile apps, as a car maker might develop new models. What’s brewing next inside Facebook Creative Labs, its in-house app incubator, could mean the company doesn’t have to spend $19 billion on the next big app.